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The co-founders of Sweetch, a mobile application that enables people to exchange on-street parking places for a flat fee. Co-founder Hamza Ouzzani said the goal is to make parking easier and reduce congestion, not to promote space "hogging," which he believes two other apps will do through their auction processes.

Like the other app companies Herrera criticized, Shifrin insisted that his company's "technology simply facilitates the exchange of parking departure information between private citizens," isn't illegal and aims to reduce parking congestion by making it easier to find parking.

"Simply put, ParkModo’s intention is to fix a problem that the city has failed to appropriately address which puts the citizens of San Francisco at great physical and emotional risk, not violate any ordinances, which you would have found out immediately had someone from your office contacted me to discuss our product," Shifrin's letter states.

Sweetch co-founder Hamza Ouazzani, meanwhile, said via email that his startup is "talking to the city to show them that we are more interested by solving the parking crisis in SF than anything else."

For that reason, the San Francisco company Friday launched Freetch, an open source project for developers to create apps that will help people find parking.

Ouzzani said previously that his app is different from the other two because it doesn't enable people to set the prices on parking spots, instead charging a $5 flat fee, $4 of which is refunded when the user passes on the parking spot to someone else through the app.

ParkModo, by contrast, had posted employment listings on Craigslist promising to pay drivers at a rate of $13 per hour to occupy public parking spaces in the Mission District, set sale prices and turn them over to paying users of its app.

"Our company is launching an awesome app that rewards people to sell their on-street parking spots before leaving to people who need a spot," the company's Craigslist posting said. "To help us promote the app, we are looking for 20 people with cars and iPhones to park around the mission and use the app to offer their parking spots to people looking for parking"

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